Black New Yorkers

From the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at The New York Public Library comes Black New Yorkers - an interactive timeline that traces the history of black individuals in New York City from 1613 through 2000. Black New Yorkers incorporates a number of thoughtful essays and primary source documents that illuminate this history. The timeline consists of five essays, each of which addresses a specific historical era. In the first essay, "Slavery and Freedom: 1613- 1865," readers can learn about the lives of free and enslaved black individuals during this period and view legal papers, illustrated portraits, and an 1841 issue of African Methodist Episcopal Church Magazine. This essay also highlights the stories of a number of important black New Yorkers from this period. The other four essays address the experiences of black New Yorkers during the Reconstruction, the first World War, the Great Depression, World War II and the 1950s, and between 1960-2000, respectively. Another highlight of this project is the resources page, which features two digitized NYPL collections. The first is "Negroes of New York," a Works Project Administration survey that documented the lives of black New Yorkers throughout history. Project writers included Ralph Ellison and Claude McKay. The second is a collection of issues of The Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association.